Word: parson
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...Parson Weems has been remembered by generations of Americans only as the man -presumably a dust-dry, thin-lipped little pedant-who invented or at least popularized the most famous lie in U.S. history: the fable of George Washington and the cherry tree. As revived by Van Wyck Brooks in The World of Washington Irving, the Rev. Mason Locke Weems appears to have been an attractive and useful citizen. A cheerful, ruddy-faced clergyman who had given up his parish to become a book agent (the Episcopal Church in the South was demoralized after the Revolution), Parson Weems...
During World War I, when she was subbing as the editor for her husband, a Quitman clergyman used his churchly influence to wheedle a local grocer out of more than his Hooverized share of flour. The news leaked, and Quitman's food administrator cracked down on the parson. The scandal rocked the town. A Quitman banker, chief elder of the church, ordered Miss Edna to write an editorial denouncing the food administrator. She laughed him out of her office. Next day came word that the bank was going to foreclose a loan on the Free Press. When this news...
...writer. His sister happened upon one of 1782's best-sellers - J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer. The Hazlitts were enchanted with its lyrical mixture of democracy and agriculture. Father Hazlitt, a struggling Unitarian minister, decided to emigrate. Soon Parson Hazlitt established Boston's first Unitarian church. But ill-health and parish problems (he would rather "die in a ditch," he said, than kowtow to his congregation) drove Parson Hazlitt back to Britain. Wrote the future author of Winterslow, then aged eight: "I shall never forget that we came...
...Revealing a few additional morsels of her billets-doux to the House, Coffee remarked: ". . . the rules of etiquette and the spirit of fair play prevent me from including any more excerpts from Miss Kellems' correspondence with the Nazi Count of Argentina." Miss Kellems, 48-year-old parson's daughter, who last January briefly denied she had ever known Zedlitz, raged in a statement for the press: "The perfect coordination . . . among Secretary Morgenthau, Mr. [Columnist Drew] Pearson and Mr. Coffee is a joy to behold. . . . Come off the floor of that House, Mr. Coffee, where you are protected...
Mean Man. Turner's gaunt face and his high dome give him the look of a parson. On leave before the war, he used to live with his wife and his Lhasa terriers at their comfortable Carmel, Calif, home, playing golf, fishing, talking incessantly, growing roses, reading Conrad through gold-rimmed spectacles and dreaming of the day when he would retire and take a round-the-world cruise aboard a freighter. To his colleagues (who know how to use monosyllables respectfully) he is known as "a mean son-of-a-bitch...